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“It must have been something. I have to say, I don’t envy you, arriving prepared to combat trained soldiers and being faced with nothing more than a hastily assembled militia.”
She pauses, hand hovering in a moment of stasis before it continues in its motion to grasp the chess piece. The marble is cool between her thumb and forefinger as she advances it forward.
“In all honesty, I had expected it. The Gaspard territory is by no means large, and Lord Lonato in no financial position to raise anything other than the common people to his cause.”
Claude picks up his gaze from the board to stare at her, and she stares back, unyielding.
“I’ve yet to hear how you feel about the matter, Princess.”
How she feels about it, how absurd.
“Oh, is that what you were getting at? I had no idea you were so vested in my emotional wellbeing.” It isn’t said meanly, the words absent of any true bite. Her voice as even as it ever is.
His gaze dips back down, and he cups his chin within his palm as he returns to surveying the game. His eyes move slow, lazily over the pieces, taking an overlong time considering each and how they might best be used to defend his position. Historically she has been equally likely to remark on the lack in his decision-making skills, or make her impatience known by reminding him that they do not have all day to spend in the shadow of a large oak on an inconsequential game.
Now, she stays uncharacteristically silent. Waiting. She doesn’t know what she wants to come out of his mouth, that he cares about her welfare like any peer would. That they are more than that. Closer.
“Is it so strange to want to know you’re alright? It’s more than a bit difficult to gauge what is going on in that head of yours.”
He still hasn’t made his move, and it comes to her that he’s not going to until she answers.
A sigh. “I feel that his actions were born from emotion. He was a father who had lost a son on the word of a single individual. It makes sense that he reacted in the way he did. In a way it’s remarkable that he stayed his hand for four years instead of lashing out immediately.”
There’s a shift in Claude’s expression, while it had never been open, it closes now entirely. His eyes hardening as he stares at her, and there’s a part of her that wants to balk from his gaze, or amend her statement so he doesn’t look at her like an enemy sighted.
“You think any part of what he did was remarkable? He lost his own son and decided to send other peoples’ to their deaths, and for what? He had to know he couldn’t win with a dozen peasants and a handful of good weaponry, not against the force they would send to quell what couldn’t even be called an uprising.”
A sound emerges from her throat, disbelieving. “So, you think he should have done nothing?
“All I’m saying is that sacrificing other peoples’ children after you lost your own? Sounds more than a bit selfish.”
He finally makes his move. It’s not an advance forward, just another part in the careful rearranging of his forces to receive her should she approach at any angle.
“Did he sacrifice them? From what I witnessed they were willing to devote themselves to his cause, even if that decision is what brought them to their ends. Naming them as simple sacrifices erases that choice, and their own will from the equation.”
“Are you really going to sit here and argue that’s not what they were in the end? No matter how well you dress it up, they were still sacrificed to appease the memory of someone long gone. They were put down, and by your own hand.”
“I wouldn’t speak so of the dead.”
Like they were cattle, like she had slaughtered them without remorse.
His eyes lose their steel, and turn more speculative as they take her in fully. “Huh. You always seem so unflinching, I didn’t think this kind of talk would bother you.”
“So, that’s how you see me.” She smiles slightly, a small bitter curl upwards. “As some sort of unfeeling weapon.”
“Isn’t that how you see yourself?”
She stills entirely, her expression and every inch of her frozen. She waits again, for him to smirk, for some pleasure to cross his face at the fact that he has knocked her so off-balance. It never appears.
Instead, simply. “It’s your move.”